You should preorder so that you can post this on the preorderer's modding subforum. There's no real reason, besides you getting to be part of the cool guy's club.
You've been playing multiplayer so I assume you've got a friend who has already preordered. Is he going to post here at all?

Triangles vs quads - as far as the PC is concerned, a quad is 2 triangles. However, most editing programs show "faces" - which can be tris, quads, or even n-sided polygons like pentagons or octagons. If a model shows 400 quads, that's 800 tris, but a model with 300 quads, 90 tris and 10 pentagons has 720 tris.

When it matters (like in lowpoly modeling for mobile games), it's easiest to tell the tri count since it's instantly clear exactly how many faces there are in the object.

Normal maps can be generated from a highpoly model. You don't need the texture, but you do need to have the lowpoly model unwrapped.
You can also generate normal map from an image (such as the texture) using xNormal or CrazyBump or other such program.

Try looking for references.
Rio focused on birds, try to see if you can find a making-of video of the wings.
Kung Fu Panda 1 and 2 both have several bird characters, but IIRC all didn't have feathered wings.
Stuart Little 2 had two birds in named roles, and Margalo (the smaller one) seems like a good reference for this project.
Big Buck Bunny, a Blender open-source movie, had a fully rigged bird in a minor role (it's seen during the opening). All the project files are free too, so you can actually download the files and see the rig in action.
Here's an old tutorial for rigging a bird wing for animation (not games) in an outdated version of Blender. It's not usable as-is, for various reasons, but like in your drawing, the wing feathers are divided into several areas.http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthr ... ing-part-1

You can't translate movie rigging to game rigging straight away. Having dozens of bones in the wings makes animation calculations heavier and slows down the game. There's a few ways around this. One would be to use blend shapes / shape keys. They're basically a way of saving animations made in Blender using unlimited number of bones and modifiers into a mesh. For the computer, blending between the normal mesh and the blend shaped mesh is easier than calculating an animation with several bones on the fly. However, I doubt you'd want to have too many blend shapes around. There can be a dozen or so at least, since they're used for facial animation. Several blend shapes can also be blended together - for example, right eye open, left eye half-open, mouth open, mouth shaped to make an 'E' phoneme.
One problem with blend shapes is that you need to control them from the script side.

You could also try to get by only using a few extra bones for the feathers. You would have to make new animations where the feather movements and the hand movements are synchronized. It is lots of work, though, and getting it to work properly in all situations will probably take a lot of trial and error.

Also I've got no idea if we can make the feathers act with physics yet - this is just an alpha, and I don't think modders have tried adding custom jiggle physics yet.

I can report on the 'jiggle' effect, sir!
While it is quite possible to apply a Soft IK effect as seen on the rabbit's ears or the wolf's tail, I ran into strange anomolies when the character entered ragdoll mode. The jiggly appendage tended to stretch and get distorted wildly. I have yet to get off my lazy ass long enough to investigate this problem further.

CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS: the picture above, and figuring out Normal mapping( and some other mappings) And the models really havent started yet, i want to get my head around Textures and the way they fit on things before going wild in blender.

That's perfectly fine. I get distracted or busy with Dominance pretty easy, so it's ok if you have other stuff you want to do for a little while. I'll be waiting though! I'm excited for when you've learned enough to make the Avians and get them into OG someday.

Agh, I'm starting to get all sentimental. I can't really say "I'll do that someday" anymore, at least in the relatively short term of the next few years, as I'll be shipping for boot camp in less than 6 months. Assuming I don't absolutely fall on my face in a way that prevents me from enlisting, I'd really not have time for Overgrowth mods, or even to work on Dominance. My plans are to do university game programming courses while I'm active duty, so I would have little if any at all spare time for this fun stuff I love. I'm gonna be all *tear face* when I leave for boot camp because I won't get to hangout on here and play Overgrowth nearly as often anymore XD God, I'll miss talking to you guys as often. Hopefully, I'll still have time to get on occasionally though.

Korban3 wrote:Agh, I'm starting to get all sentimental. I can't really say "I'll do that someday" anymore, at least in the relatively short term of the next few years, as I'll be shipping for boot camp in less than 6 months.

If it helps any, I've been thinking "I'll do that someday" since before you were around here.
I remember when you first appeared and made a custom character and I was like, 'aww, I was going to do that some day'. Still haven't!

Mwahaha. I'm evil. Pure modding evil.
You can still make a good looking one XD Andrige's bear is pretty boss looking so far. I produced a fairly good texture too! With no 3D painting. I used Sculptris to sculpt details and used the ambient occlusion map Blender generated as my detail map and can color over it in Paint.net. I felt so proud, 'cept I used Tangent space for the normal, which is incorrect for OG, I believe. And it looked odd in-game, so I figure it was incorrect.

Hey Korban, never give up, maybe we'll stay in contact, i am coming up with alot of ideas of making video games, and i would like to go to college for Basic video game codeing (so i can converse with the programers) and Modeling, textures, the whole shabang also painting and drawing, because in the future i want to make some really really top quality video games (much of which inspired by overgrowth) with stories and plots that will change the game industry, haha, in oposition to the crappy sexist attitude of the games that are out these days.

So. Games, Writing stories, Comic books. and composing music. that's going to be tough, but i want to get into it all. Bleh. Good entrance into composing media for people over the internet would be wonderful...

But for now, i have to get my ged done, get a normal steady job. And keep playing piano, drawing, painting coming up with stories and plot twists, inventing things. and learn then in the end im not going to be able to do everything myself. lol

And also, practice texturing and modeling, im working on a penguin, or at least was, for a game that me and my friend who wanted to learn programing. THe game dwindled into 2d, after we desided that it was going to be to hard. and now nothing at all.

So sprites i might have to start with? lol

Anyways, ive been puzzled about the AVIAN!

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There are trees, they have alpha textures right!!?? so why cant the feathers be that way. i say to myself. But i dont know how it works.

Im trying to anticipate problems to much i think... and its stopping my work.
_

Things i need to know, flat out.

How to texture my bird guy without having poor transitions. i want him to not have any miss matched texturing. how do i avoid it? say, a feather, 1 big one, branches from one side of the uv, to another ( unwrapping seems pretty difficult too) and its separated by an ugly line.

UV unrwrapping in general and use of normal maps...

and useing transperent textures without triggering the shiney effect of which i have heard does that. though over the updates this may have changed or can be set to not do so for certain textures?

THe modeling will probably be fairly easy. its the rest of the stuff that seems hard. haha. 1 MODEL is taking me THIS LONG!

I should be ashamed.

Also, any idea of the height of the ingame characters? and... ugh.. so confused now.

ageshero wrote:There are trees, they have alpha textures right!!?? so why cant the feathers be that way. i say to myself. But i dont know how it works.

There's a specific type of code used to draw the images on the screen. For plants, this code (shader) uses the image's alpha color for transparency, and makes the plant sway as if moved by the wind.

For the characters, the shader not only draws the character but also animates it. Since a character without animation is useless and this animation part is more compelx, it's much harder to change the character shader.

Yeah, it's pretty complex stuff in there. It doesn't decide which animation is being played, but it does handle all the transforms.
Edit: Actually, that might only be the bone transforms. I forgot blend shapes and jiggle bones. But any way, it handles some of the transforms.

Unless you use a plant shader, which wouldn't work as it does not handle animations, you cannot have alpha transparent characters, but I maintain that you could use the little fins. The game automagically makes those into alpha fur fins, and if they were to be tapered, the could be made to look somewhat like feathers.
Maybe you could look into that shader and see if the is a way to produce a feather fins shader. It'd be a copy of what is done with the original character one, but the fins would get a different rendering process. Not sure how simple it'd be to employ, but it'd be worth a shot for a good programmer (Not me. I'm not that good.)